دانلود رایگان مقاله بازاریابی مرتبط با علت با عوارض منفی

abstract

Firms increasingly develop partnerships with non-profit organizations (NPO) to support a cause and improve their corporate image. This type of Corporate Social Responsibility, called cause-related marketing, commits firms to fund associations that encourage environmental protection, international development, and other causes by donating part of their profits. In this article, we argue that when cause-related marketing is applied to products with a negative externality, these a priori win–win arrangements can generate adverse and unexpected effects. We consider a vertical differentiation model integrating two assumptions. First, consumers may perceive the firm's contribution to be higher than the actual donation. Second, consumers who value highly socially responsible behavior may prefer not to consume rather than consuming products that aren't socially responsible. In this set-up we identify several possible counter-productive effects such as the likelihood of increase of the externality and the crowding out of direct contributions. We also draw policy and managerial implications.

4. Conclusion

Departing from the conventional or popular wisdom that causerelated products are a win–win–win strategy, we showed that, under some circumstances, they can lead to counter-productive results when the product in question has a socially irresponsible feature. Environmental degradation (or other detrimental effects) may occur as well as a decrease in the efficacy of NPOs because of lower funds. These outcomes can be due to various combinations of several effects, namely increase in consumption of the entire product category, crowding-out of direct donations and the labeling of cause-related products that confuse consumers and create an inflated perception of the donation. Market power is also an important feature for the occurrence of negative side effects after introduction of CRM. Our results show that increase in consumption of the product category and increase in “pollution” are more an issue when CRM is introduced in a market without a high level of competition, i.e., a market with few competitors or with brand allegiance. While the positive effects of cause-related marketing for causes and firms and several success stories have been well documented, we argue that they deserve more academic attention, especially on dimensions that can appear as minor features but can generate firstorder effect.